marginales, qu’il s’agisse du jazz ou du cakewalk, qu’elle mêle au French cancan comme se mélangent dans ses toiles les couleurs des corps d’une société multiraciale. Il ne s’agit pourtant pas d’individus isolés : elle aime montrer des scènes collectives, parcs ou piscines, cirque ou music-hall. Sa présence dans de nombreux tableaux en témoigne : loin de regarder de l’extérieur, elle choisit de se situer elle-même dans ces mondes ou demi-mondes. La perspective minoritaire qui a longtemps relégué Juliette Roche aux marges de l’art lui confère aujourd’hui, au contraire, une actualité forte, au moment d’embrasser pour la première fois son œuvre entier.
If Juliette Roche is only now being discovered, it’s because most of her paintings remained unseen during her lifetime. In a male-dominated art world, from Parisian Cubism to New York Dada, not only was she a woman, but she was above all interested in women: in her many portraits, which give pride of place to domestic space, kinship appears exclusively feminine; similarly, there are only women couples. No doubt it was her second position that led her to give an important place to minorities in her paintings. This was already the case in Paris, before the First World War: in the Pigalle district, for example, she shows a black man, an effeminate boy and a prostitute sitting together at a café terrace, or, in a boutique, a couple of women, one of whom is wearing a suit and tie. This sheds light on her taste for masks, which both hide and display sexual as well as racial minorities. In the second half of the 1910s, her stay in New York redoubled her fascination with these marginal cultures, whether jazz or cakewalking, which she mixed with the French
cancan just as the colors of the bodies of a multiracial society are mixed in her canvases. Yet these are not isolated individuals: she likes to show collective scenes, parks or swimming pools, circuses or music halls. Her presence in numerous paintings bears witness to this: far from looking in from the outside, she chooses to situate herself in these worlds or half-worlds. On the contrary, the minority perspective that has long relegated Juliette Roche to the bangs of the art world now gives her a strong topicality, as we embrace her entire oeuvre for the first time.
JULIETTE ROCHE, MINORITY
Éric Fassin et Joana Masó
